The four things you must know to be a complete surfer
As a surfer trying to progress and improve, these four things will help fill in the gaps of what you need to know and how to apply that to your surfing.
There’s four attributes to being a complete surfer, those being ocean, mind, body, and equipment.
So, in surfing there are elements that we can control and elements that we can’t control. We can’t control the ocean, but we can understand it. We can control our bodies. We can train our bodies. We can control our equipments choices and we can train our minds to think positively, or we can react negatively to situations.
So, in surfing, the one thing that we have 100% control over that we tend to neglect all the time is our bodies. So, if we go, touch your nose, touch your ear, touch your head, we can do all of those things, but it’s a muscle memory action that requires a lot of repetition to perfect. So, if you were to go run a race, you wouldn’t rush out and buy a brand new pair of shoes thinking, Hey, these shoes are going to win the race for me.
But as surfers, we tend to go, well, I’m a crappy surfer. Let me go spend $800 on a new board. Thinking that, that new board is going to make us a world champion. What we do need to do is train the muscle memory so that we can learn how to bottom turn and lean and top turn and twist. And that body movement can be applied to any particular surfboard and we’ll still be able to surf it right. So, training our bodies will allow us to ride any equipment that we want to ride. What goes hand-in-hand with that is actually understanding a wave where the power isn’t in a wave, how to tap into those energy sources. When we understand a wave, we’ll learn to slow down and surf the wave at the speed of the wave. Use our bodies correctly, use the equipment correctly, and when those three things are done properly, mentally, we’re going to be super confident, and we’re going to be able to roast to the challenge and surf really, really well.
However, if one of those aspects are not there, for example, if we get to the beach and it’s one foot and we hate tiny waves, a body language is just going to drop. It’s going to be like, ah, it’s smaller, it’s shitty. I don’t want to go out. Or the flip side, if it’s huge and we hate big waves, we’re like, Oh my crap. I don’t want to go out. This too big. Straightaway that sends a message to our mind. Don’t go out there skiing. We’re not going to be relaxed. We’re going to struggle to perform. So your mind is super important in controlling your body, and we need to be in control of our bodies and minds, understand the ocean, be able to control our boards, and when that whole package comes together, we are relaxed, we enjoy ourselves and we become great surfers.
In surfing, there are elements that we can control and elements that we can’t control. We can’t control the ocean, but we can understand it. We can control our bodies. We can train our bodies. We can control our equipments choices and we can train our minds to think positively, or we can react negatively to situations. So, in surfing, the one thing that we have 100% control over that we tend to neglect all the time is our bodies. So if we go to touch your nose, touch your ear, touch your head, we can do all of those things. But it’s a muscle memory action that requires a lot of repetition to perfect.
So, if you were to go run a race, you wouldn’t rush out and buy a brand new pair of shoes thinking, Hey, these shoes are going to win the race for me. But as surfers, we tend to go, well, I’m a crappy surfer. Let me goes spend $800 on a new board. Thinking that, that new board’s going to make us a world champion. What we do need to do is train the muscle memory so that we can learn how to bottom turn and lean and top turn and twist. And that body movement can be applied to any particular surfboard. And we’ll still be able to surf it right.
